Quotes About Emotions

even now, after years of study in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not in the least understood.

Sometimes it feels like we're all living in a Prozac nation. The United States of Depression.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful existential reasons, but because I need immediate relief.

One of the terrible fallacies of contemporary psychotherapy is that if people would just say how they felt, a lot of problems could be solved.

Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, I realized I didn't want to be anything at all.

Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on?... I don't know the answer, I know only that I can't. I don't want any more vicissitudes, I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I've had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted.

if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.

And she keeps saying, how can you do this to me? And i want to scream, what do you mean, how can I do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could I do this to myself?

Taking a hypersensitive approach to life had come to seem so much more pure and honest then joining the ranks of the numb masses who could let it all slide by. What I stopped realizing was that if you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all. Everything registers at the same decibel...

That's what it's like in my head all the time, constant snow, constant weather patterns of all sorts - blizzards, cyclones.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn't seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I'm just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it's over.

And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.

You don't need an excuse to be depressed.

Just like I didn't dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him when I was down in Texas, wanting to be a modern woman who's supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I'm never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, what makes you think I'm so rich that you can steal my heart and it won't mean a thing?

Good and bad are not opposites, they are both just different forms of intensity.

that I don't want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is to not feel this way in the first place.

I'm not crying because you're mean. I just can't imagine how incredibly painful it must be to be you.

He seemed a fool-everyone who didn't feel like me seems a fool.

Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.

I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason I was always running - and I'd have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else?

I was scared of the way I felt when I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason why I was always running - and I'd have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else? The senselessness of this display was too upsetting and contemplate.